Theater: Chilean playwright takes on Syria in ‘Kiss’

Tuesday

Oct 31, 2017 at 10:50 AMOct 31, 2017 at 10:53 AM

By Iris Fanger/For The Patriot Ledger

The Chilean playwright, Guillermo Calderon, wrote “Kiss,” a drama about the war in Syria, even though he has never traveled to the region. Moreover, he wrote the play in English rather than his native tongue, to be translated into German for a production in Dusseldorf. This layering of language might be one reason for the feeling of disconnection from Syrian culture and its people; its complicated structure is another.

Unhappily, the Boston area premiere of the drama at Arts Emerson’s Paramount Center, neither surmounts the obstacles posed by the playwright, nor offers a credible staging of his work. The topsy-turvy turn of emotions required by the script would be daunting for the most experienced of actors, but proves an assignment beyond the experience of the troupe of Emerson College undergraduates who have been assigned the roles.

Under the direction of David Dower, co-artistic director of Arts Emerson, “Kiss” comes across as an apology by the playwright for his lack of insight rather than a powerful indictment of the evils of war, except for a brief scene at the end. Since Calderon lived through the Pinochet era in Chile, he knows first-hand about the dangers inflicted on an innocent populace by a ruthless dictator, but for “Kiss” he wanders a circuitous path around the horrors, except for the entrance of a surprise character – the one Arab actor on stage – perhaps the result of lucky cast.

The play begins on the set of a living room in Damascus 2014, where four young people are engaged in a switching partners, while keeping secrets about promises they have made and broken. We understand that we are watching a television soap opera because there are camera technicians around the edges of the set and two TV monitors hanging on either side of the stage. The acting style is over-the-top, as if to spoof the genre. The scene goes on for much too long.

When the actors of the show-within-the show break character and change into their true personalities we learn that they found this script by a Syrian playwright online. They are excited to have tracked down the playwright in Lebanon and place a call to her. A large video screen is trundled on stage to display a woman in dark sunglasses and platinum blonde wig as if we are listening in and watching a conversation on Skype. Since she speaks little English, she is accompanied by a translator.

As the credulous actors ask naïve questions and the woman answers, the actors learn that they have totally misunderstood the play. It seems that war is the theme, not mismatched love affairs. The woman alludes to the play’s directions for gunfire in the background – which the actors have missed – and explains that the constant coughing by the characters means they have all been gassed and will probably not survive.

The actors determine to re-do the scene, this time infusing it with pain and suffering The result is even less convincing until an Arab woman (Deniz Khateri), chanting an ethnic melody comes and sits among them, creating the most affecting moments of the play, even though her entrance moves the work into the realm of fantasy.

Surely, there are many works of art in the offing to enlighten us about the terrible war in Syria, the murder of its civilians, and the displacement of more than one million refugees from their home – but “Kiss” is not one of them. For now, we must rely on the newspaper headlines for the facts, and the too-vivid, incomprehensible images on the nightly newscasts to tear at our heart-strings.